Eleven-year-old Salem, a refugee boy, drew this picture showing what happened in Syria before his family fled for Lebanon. Photo: Laura Sheahen/Caritas

By Laura Sheahen, Caritas Communications Officer

“We’d move from neighbour to neighbour to escape the bombing,” says Ahmed, a father of six from the Syrian city of Homs. As civil war in his country escalated, he watched buildings bombarded and people injured or killed.

“There came a moment when I looked at my children and thought, ‘nothing matters but them.’ I knew we had to leave.”

If they only had themselves to worry about, thousands of Syrian parents might take their chances and stay in their country even as bombs drop and snipers fire. “If it were not for my children, I would never have left Syria. I should be there,” says Ahmed. Instead, he took his family to Jordan.

Ilham, an epileptic mother of six, was shot in the leg by a sniper. But for several months after, she remained in Syria. “I didn’t want to leave my country,” she says. Finally, though, it wasn’t about her: “I was afraid my kids would be killed.” She too fled to Jordan.

Families would hide wherever they could. “There’d be gunfire all day. Our girls would hear it all the time,” says Farida*, who fled to Beirut with her husband and two small daughters. “One morning about 5 a.m. it got so bad I carried them, sleeping, to the bathroom. It was the safest room.”

“It was hard even to leave the house to get bread,” says another man named Ahmed. “After midnight, we’d call the grocery store owner and ask him to open up his shop. We’d go to buy anything they had quickly—not even looking to see what the groceries were.”

Christina Pianca of Caritas Ambrosiana (Milan), who volunteers for Caritas Jordan, talks about one Syrian refugee family she met. “We saw a boy about seven or eight and were told he’d been playing in the street with other children. He was shot in the head,” she says. “He can talk, but he’s lost some limb function. They were trying to figure out if they could operate.”

Syrian refugee children in Mafraq, Jordan. For over a year before they fled Syria, their mother kept them inside the house for safety’s sake. Photo: Laura Sheahen/Caritas

For more than a year, a woman named Fairuz “wouldn’t let my children leave the house. I was afraid they wouldn’t return.” The children sat at home, playing games and missing the friends and classes they had at school. She and her family made it out; all 18 of them are now crowded into a flat in Mafraq, Jordan.

Some parents are staying behind but sending their children to safety. Fadi, age 16, travelled without his family from Syria to the Jordanian city of Zarqa, where he now lives with his sister. “Our mother kept praying we’d find a way to get him out,” says his sister. “Finally her prayers were answered.”

The first challenge for Syrian parents is keeping their children alive. The next one is keeping them healthy. In Lebanon and Jordan, Caritas is providing food, medical care, and emergency items like blankets to Syrian refugee families. Because many husbands are missing or killed, Caritas pays particular attention to vulnerable families headed by women.

In a slum area of Beirut, Leila and her four children are crowded into one damp, garage-like room. She watches her 11-year-old son Salem sketch a drawing of what he saw before they left their town: soldiers shooting people and airplanes overhead. “We had a good life once in Syria,” Leila says. “But I saw what was all around my children,” she says, looking at the picture. “This is why we left.”

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Caritas Internationalis is the global confederation of 165 Catholic organisations working on behalf of the poor. It is the arm through which the Church delivers its moral mission to help the most vulnerable and excluded people, whatever their religion or race.